I want to know what is the construction of an accelerometer. Is it some kind of mercury switch? How it detects the position of the phone?
And please let me know whether this accelerometer has been the integral part of N95 hardware? If it was, then why was there no option to activate it in N95 earlier firmware?
I have the latest firmware (v.30.0.015) on my N95 and my auto rotation works brilliantly.

argh

02-10-2008, 04:30 PM

Details of accelerometers are here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerometer).

The accelerometer has always been part of the N95 but was originally only used as an orientation sensor for the camera, so it knew whether the picture taken was portrait or landscape (it may also have been used for image stabilisation in the video camera).

The user API only allowed the orientation to be retrieved, no detail on how much the phone was tilted, etc. Later, Nokia Research Center released an API that they were using for the Activity Monitor application. This allowed detailed accelerometer values to be received, allowing for more flexibility in applications.

In more recent firmwares, I believe that this functionality (or similar) has been embedded so that you no longer need to install it.